After being sidelined by the pandemic, Daryl Hall and John Oates are back on tour, but don’t expect any new music from the legendary duo anytime soon. Oates says that after so many years of the two doing their own projects, it’s hard for him to imagine what kind of material they’d come up with if they did decide to work on something new together.
Oates recently told Billboard that before COVID, he and Hall were discussing a new project, but, as he puts it, “It never really got past first base.” And even if it had, Oates says, “I don’t know what Daryl and I will do [musically], because we wouldn’t know until we did it.”
He explains, “We’ve been working independently for so many years now that I don’t know even how we would write together, to be honest with you. I think it might be more of a collaboration with maybe other people or something. I’m not sure.”
Meanwhile, John is interested in figuring out how he can continue working with Daryl live while still having time left for some of the things he was able to do during lockdown, like writing music for movies, working on solo material, doing charity projects and collaborating with other musicians. For him, that was the silver lining of lockdown.
“It was a revelation in terms of what my life could be like in a parallel universe,” Oates says of his forced time off the road. “Now the question is, how do I make that parallel universe this universe? That’s a goal of mine for the future. Because, you know, in a really bad situation, I think I tried to…embrace the fact that there was an opportunity to do something different.”
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.